Stilta raises $10.5M from a16z and YC to help companies rediscover the patents they forgot they had

Source: TechCrunch

Background

Oskar Block has never been able to stay away from entrepreneurship for long. He was just 18 when he launched his first startup, building machine learning models for sports betting. “I’ve always been drawn to solving difficult data problems,” he told TechCrunch. He later moved into consulting, helping companies with AI integration strategies and learning what it takes to get large enterprises to embrace the technology.

Block then took a role at an autonomous trucking company, where he saw firsthand how manual and slow the patent process was. The idea for his next company came one evening at dinner with a friend and colleague, Tobias Estreen, when Estreen’s father, a patent attorney, recounted his daily routine: “Reading the same kind of documents, the same way he had for thirty years,” Block recalled.

The Idea

Block and Estreen identified an opening and teamed up with two others, Petrus Werner and Oscar Adamsson, to launch Stilta, an AI platform designed to automate the research and analytical work behind intellectual property cases—the labor‑intensive work that has historically made patent litigation slow and expensive.

Funding

The startup announced a $10.5 million seed round on Tuesday, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Other investors include Y Combinator and operators from companies such as OpenAI, Legora, and Lovable.

How Stilta Works

Stilta functions like a team of lawyers. Users input a patent number and any relevant content; a network of AI agents then:

• Searches for other patents that might conflict with the claim
• Flags similar property that could apply
• Pulls the filing and court history of the patent

“The agents reason in parallel and converge the way a room full of specialists would, but at a scale no human team can match,” Block said. The lawyer or professional remains in the “driver’s seat,” guiding the analysis rather than ceding control. The output is litigation‑grade: a report and claim charts with pinpoint citations to every piece of evidence.

Industry Context

Other companies in this space include Solve Intelligence and DeepIP. Legal tech has become a hot sector amid the broader AI boom. Block noted that parts of the legal industry are already seeing AI‑accelerated change, while other segments may not be ready for it for a long time.

He added that many companies are holding onto patents they’ve “never enforced, never licensed, never even analyzed properly because the cost of doing so was prohibitive.” Reducing that cost barrier is Stilta’s primary goal. Making patent litigation more efficient and affordable could unlock latent value in dormant patent portfolios.

Outlook

“The question isn’t really whether the legal system is prepared for AI,” Block said. “It’s whether companies are prepared for what becomes possible when the analytical bottleneck disappears.”